When people talk about the 1980 film Rude Boy nowadays, they call it "the Clash movie". It featured the band, portraying themselves, and a selection of great live performances. But they were not the notional stars of the film. That was a young man called Ray Gange, the Rude Boy of the title.
Rude Boy is a strange piece of work, stuck in that always awkward place between documentary and fiction. Uncomfortable and (in some cases) reluctant amateurs struggle to portray themselves, or people who share their names. To describe Gange's's own performance as wooden would be unfair: wood can't drink heavily and look embarrassed while mumbling its lines.
The original 1960s rude boys were sharp-dressed, gang-affiliated young Jamaicans. A decade later, the Clash appropriated the term as a romantic catch-all for their own followers. At first, the 20-year-old Ray Gange on the screen seems to be an archetypal Clash fan, albeit one lucky enough to be offered a job as a roadie. But it soon becomes clear that the pro-capitalist and borderline racist views he expresses are at odds with the values championed by his new employers.
During the period of filming, spring 1978 to spring 1979, Margaret Thatcher was on the verge of assuming power, and racism was a major issue. Joint producer-directors David Mingay and Jack Hazan pushed for Gange to challenge the band. Thus, the screen Ray Gange is partly the real Ray Gange, partly a composite of other Clash hangers-on, and partly the film-makers' zeitgeist indicator.
The shiftlessness and drunkenness are authentic Gange, though: it's not easy to hump amplifiers with a can of Special Brew stuck to your lips, so Gange didn't bother. Here, Mingay and Hazan had no choice but to run with the result, playing up his haplessness. When the Clash finally lose patience and leave him stranded, the question is not so much why as why so long?
After watching the rough cut of Rude Boy, the band certainly had regrets. They instructed Mingay and Hazan to cut it to 50 minutes of straight concert footage, and when the pair refused, the band withdrew their support. The most recent DVD reissue of Rude Boy seems to agree about its key selling point, offering the option to "just play the Clash". For the record: the 20-odd blistering live performances would never have been captured had it not been for (the real) Ray Gange, who first pointed Mingay and Hazan in the Clash's direction.
By the time the film was released, Gange was in Hollywood with a green card - working on a building site. He quit, involving himself with various "band projects" on the local punk scene, and picking up occasional work as a TV and film extra, though Rude Boy remains his only credit on imdb.com. In late 1982, he moved back to his native Brixton. Asked to sum up what he has done since, he offers "band management, record label owner, narcotics vortex, art degree, parent, and get old". He no longer drinks or smokes, and is a full-time father and a part-time artist who hopes to show his paintings and sculptures on a website by the end of the summer.
Now heavy-set and balding - but affable and surprisingly healthy-looking - he recently played an Italian assassin in an unnamed short, which "may never see the light of day". He's also in a video for Radio London, recorded this spring by the Devildolls Rock'n'Roll Street Gang in support of the Strummerville foundation.
Meanwhile, the screen Ray Gange appears to have acquired cult status. The real Gange insists it was only ever "journalists" who concerned themselves with a political analysis of either Rude Boy or his role, anyway. These days, people are simply impressed that he was there and has the film to prove it. "It's a source of identification for a lot of the band's fans," he says. "They weren't expecting an existential De Niro-esque tour de force." And, he adds, he's happy to hear film offers from anyone who knows they won't be getting De Niro.
myspace.com/raygange
· Marcus Gray is the author of The Clash: Return of the Last Gang in Town
